YouTube Wants You to Sit and Stay Awhile

Known for its world of mostly short videos, how can YouTube keep its audience interested for longer stretches of the day?

RANDALL STROSS

TWO weeks ago, YouTube celebrated when the number of videos viewed daily on its site reached two billion, a milestone.

But it also used the occasion to express its envy of television’s continuing hold on viewers: “Although the average user spends 15 minutes a day on YouTube, that’s tiny compared to the five hours a day people spend watching TV,” the company observed on its blog. “Clearly, we need to give you more reason to watch more videos!”

YouTube, however, faces a huge obstacle: very short videos are unlikely to hold interest when watched in long sequences. It remains to be seen whether viewers will ever be interested in watching hours and hours of typically two-and-a-half-minute videos, even if produced professionally and well matched to individual tastes and moods.

The end of a program — whether it has lasted two minutes or two hours — invites consideration of doing something else. In YouTube’s case, of course, the end comes often. Jamie Davidson, a YouTube product manager, says that the 15 minutes of daily viewing by a user typically involves six videos, with the conclusion of each presenting “a decision point, and every decision point is an opportunity to leave.”

“We’re looking at how to push users into passive-consumption mode, a lean-back experience,” Mr. Davidson says.

Margaret Stewart, chief of YouTube’s user experience team, says the site is not only striving to “sequence short-form content seamlessly,” but is also building up “long-form content,” television shows, professionally produced Webisodes and movies, as well as live sporting and music events. She says YouTube has 7,000 hours of movies and shows to offer.

But an embarrassingly visible portion seems to be of a type that fails to be even entertainingly bad. In January, the critic Joe Queenan inventoried in The Guardian the contents he found: “Tons of schlock, cult films, trash, direct-to-video overstock and tongue-in-cheek vanity projects.”

“The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism” and “Cheerleader Ninjas” were among the YouTube titles of which Mr. Queenan said: “All sound great. But they are not great. Not, not, not.”

This fall, YouTube says it will introduce a radically different, uncluttered look, with YouTube Leanback. It will have a separate Web address and will start playing a video the moment a user clicks on the site. When one video ends, another will start automatically, eliminating those dreaded “decision points” that invite abandonment. Viewers will be able to select channels, but the flow of programs, whether short or long, will be continuous.

“There’s no browsing, no searching, no clicking. It behaves like you would expect television to,” said Hunter Walk, a YouTube program manager who provided a brief peek this month at Google’s developer conference.

Google, YouTube’s corporate parent, now sees the living room as strategically important terrain for the entire company, and isn’t waiting for YouTube to win the beachhead. The big announcement of the recent conference was the introduction of Google TV; it seeks to enlist hardware manufacturers and cable service providers in adopting Google-supplied technology that will make it easy to simultaneously navigate television programs, online video and TV-friendly Web sites on the living room set.

Google says YouTube Leanback will be introduced in coordination with the release of Google TV devices in the fall. But Google TV, the larger initiative, is designed with the assumption that viewers will do quite a bit of searching with a keyboard on their lap, a sit-up-straight, think-about-what-you’re-doing form of engagement. Significantly, it’s called Google TV, not YouTube TV.

To lean back and enjoy an endless stream of YouTube videos now, before YouTube Leanback arrives, a viewer can visit the Web site of NowMov, a start-up in San Francisco that offers an instant-on YouTube experience. Using Twitter feeds to determine which YouTube videos are appearing with the greatest frequency in Tweets, NowMov starts playing a YouTube video as soon as a visitor arrives at its site. In the background, it is downloading other oft-Tweeted videos. If a user isn’t interested in what’s playing, a click of a “Next” button starts another one instantly.

“If too much of your brain is occupied with the process of choosing, it takes you out of the experience of watching,” explains James Black, a NowMov co-founder.

It’s fun to sample the NowMov experience — briefly. It’s hard to imagine, however, leaning back for hours, watching a stream of short videos that have nothing in common other than shared popularity in the moment.

NowMov opened its service only this month, and Mr. Black says he cannot yet talk about how long the average user session lasts. But if NowMov succeeds, it will fulfill Mr. Black’s ambition to free users from what he calls “the tyranny of choice.”

IN the 1940s, early television also offered what we would now call a comfortable lean-back experience in the living room. It, too, started in “autoplay mode,” serving up a continuous sequence of programs by default.

With Zenith’s introduction in 1950 of the first television remote control — the “Lazy Bones” — the lean-back position could be preserved for long periods. (Staying put was prudent; the cord that tethered the control to the set was easy to trip over.)

Today, watching NowMov requires nothing of the user, not even a click of the Next button. That’s leaning way, way back.

Was the television viewer in 1950, who at least selected channels, really a lazy bones?

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